Good God: Faith for the Rest of Us

Radbam April 12th, 2009

A few weeks ago I heard about the website Information Age Prayer, which is a site that for a fee will say prayers on your behalf. Using text to speech software, they will have a computer recite prayers for various denominations and faiths. Imagining computer software reciting sacred texts is at first blush just bizarre. Steven Hawking-esque recitations of The Shema, The Lord’s Prayer or The First Daily Prayer might be unintentionally funny to imagine, but a mechanical recitation of a sacred prayer is a bit too much, even for our hyperkinetic time-crunched society.
There may be a spiritual void for the users of this website, but filling it in this way is the height of laziness and a misuse of technology for the purpose of feeding the spirit. Don’t get me wrong, technology can be a way to express and aid people on their spiritual quest.  I’ve started a blog after all, but Information Age Prayer completely misses the point of prayer: a connection to God and the communities of faith.  As I say in Good God:

The marketplace is filled with remedies and panaceas for this emerging illness… Books and websites, and the movements and programs that spawn them, temporarily provide slave to the pain of misuse and disuse of the significant part of the self. More often than not these are only distractions, setting out 7 steps on the path to 70 more, pointing the way to a lengthy journey guided by common sense cast as the profound, often bringing the seasoned seeker full circle to the place where he began, not any wiser but certainly poorer of cash and less hopeful for having taken the trip. … To allay the suspicious evoked by emerging forms of spiritualism, clever marketers mask their sometimes silly, sometimes dangerous departures in the comforting cloak of tradition.”

Electronic Indulgences

Coincidentally, a few weeks after learning about Information Age Prayer, I was contacted by the news department of Q13, Seattle’s local Fox affiliate about this very same website. They interviewed me and some other local clergy for our take on this site and what it says about faith in the age of the internet. Click here or on the image to watch the interview.

• If you are curious, here’s the website for Information Age Prayer. Click here.
• Here is a really interesting blog post about science fiction’s take on mechanical-robotic-computerized prayer. Click here.

• In the News , Popular Culutre
• Comments(0)

Radbam February 23rd, 2009

Prague 2/23/09

Rabbi Loew and the Golem by: Mikolas Ales

It’s one thing to learn about the Golem legend through its modern incarnations in the hip, urban revisionings of the new generation of Jewish authors. The Clay Giant’s saga impressed American popular culture early in the 20th century, as it did the young lives of so many as Superman, the hyper-anglicized, ethnically deracinated Man of Steel.

It’s another thing entirely to walk the stone lanes where the legend lived, and where the Golem’s creator, Rabbi Judah Loew, reigned as Rav Supreme. The tale is a local variant of mass messianic movements, but with an admonishing twist. The Jews of Prague needed a hero (without the disco back track) to defend them against the forever simmering and often devastating anti-Semitism that lay beyond the quarter’s walls. But we are a cerebral, pious people, little schooled in the Charles Bronson vein of vigilantism. So the Jews did the next best thing: the faithful, scholarly leader Loew created a monster/robot (Czech word)/redeemer called the Golem to save the day, protecting the Jews while introducing the concept of deterrence and mutually-assured destruction to the Prague community centuries before the Cold War.

End of story? Hardly, for no Jewish narrative can conscientiously close without a strident moral message and tip of the kippah to rabbinic authority.  Loew brought the being of Vltava river mud to life by inscribing 3 Hebrew letters on its forehead: aleph-mem-tav–Emet/Truth. When the Golem went off script and off the reservation, ransacking homes and lives as the embodiment of pure, unqualified violence, Loew, its only master, scratched off the Hebrew letter aleph, leaving the word met/death, thus ending the Golem’s sacred spree.

On one level, it’s a reaffirmation of the scriptural dictum-turned-cultural imperative: Not by might, nor by power, but by (My) spirit alone…But perhaps a less obvious lesson involves the essence of Truth. While it can set you free, any absolute taken out of context or employed without measure can be counterproductive at best, destructive at worst.

My minyan (+1) of fellow travelers have reached the boundary of the Promised Land of adult freedoms and responsibilities.  Perhaps their most trying challenge will be to grow beyond the sureties of absolutes (a capacity lost to fundamentalists of all makes and models) to confront, even to embrace, the power and purpose of living life in the gray zone. Gray, the color of the Golem’s muddy form, the tenor of evolved ethical struggle, and the foggy but freeing pathway to moral resolution as our true, ultimate redemption.

• Judaism , Popular Culutre , Travel
• Comments(0)